English
4017: Travel Writing

This course
is open only to MA and PhD students in the English
Department (and to other graduate students at DU with
permission of the instructor).
The class will be a creative writing/literary studies hybrid
class—meaning, it will
be partly workshop, mostly discussion of literary texts,
with a fair amount of in-class travel writing exercises.
The course will fulfill
the requirement for a workshop outside your main genre for
PhD creative writing students.

TEXTS:

Francis
Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt John Muir, My First Summer in the SierraM.F.K. Fisher, Gastronomical Me Julia Child,
My Life in France

Travel books are about
process—the process of movement and of understanding, too.
They tell the tale of the journey toward knowledge and play
up the delights of discovery, and the voyage matters more
than any one destination. In this, they have long
anticipated the attempts of some postmodern forms of
scholarship to foreground the search for understanding, to
shift our attention to the quest for knowledge and away from
its final fruits.

—Michael Gorra, The Bells
in Their Silence

A number of things, I think, are true. One
is that there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in
intellectual life in recent years, and it is, such blurring
of kinds, continuing apace. Another is that many social
scientists have turned away from a laws-and-instances ideal
of explanation toward a cases-and-interpretations one,
looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and
pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums
and swords. Yet another is that analogies drawn from the
humanities are coming to play the kind of role in
sociological understanding that analogies drawn from the
crafts and technology have long played in physical
understanding. Further, I not only think these things are
true, I think they are true together; and it is the culture
shift that makes them so that is my subject: the
refiguration of social thought.

This genre blurring is
more than just a matter of Harry Houdini or Richard Nixon
turning up as characters in novels or of midwestern murder
sprees described as though a gothic romancer had imagined
them. It is philosophical inquiries looking like literary
criticism (think of Stanley Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau,
Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like
belles lettres morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley),
baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical
observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of
equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and
Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true
confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada),
theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (LÚvi-Strauss),
ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries
(Edward Said), epistemological studies constructed like
political tracts (Paul Feyerabend), methodological polemics
got up as personal memoirs (James Watson). Nabokov’s
Pale Fire, that impossible object made of poetry and
fiction, footnotes and images from the clinic, seems very
much of the time; one waits only for quantum theory in verse
or biography in algebra.

Of course, to a
certain extent this sort of thing has always gone
on—Lucretius, Mandeville, and Erasmus Darwin all made their
theories rhyme. But the present jumbling of varieties of
discourse has grown to the point where it is becoming
difficult either to label authors (What is
Foucault—historian, philosopher, political theorist? What
Thomas Kuhn—historian, philosopher, sociologist of
knowledge?) or to classify works (What is George Steiner’s
After Babel—linguistics, criticism, culture history?
What William Gass’s On Being Blue—treatise, causerie,
apologetic?). And thus it is more than a matter of odd
sports and occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact
that the innovative is, by definition, hard to categorize.
It is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to
suggest that what we are seeing is not just another
redrawing of the cultural map—the moving of a few disputed
borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain
lakes—but an alteration of the principles of mapping.
Something is happening to the way we think about the way we
think [my emphasis].

Running at night: it was
madness. I was courting death, or at least a kidnapping.
The capital [Baghdad] was a free-for-all; it was a state of
nature. Three was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there
was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now, they
killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping
gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible
ecosystem. One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up
in a car and beat me and gagged me and I could have screamed
like a crazy person, but I doubt anyone would have done
anything. Not even the guards. They weren’t bad people,
the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the
middle of a kidnapping? The kidnappers had more power than
anyone. I had been in Iraq too long. Going on four
years. I’d lived through everything, shootings and bomb
blasts and death, and I’d never gotten so much as a
scratch. I guess I was numb. I guess I felt invincible.
The danger seemed notional to me now, not entirely real, something I wrote about, something that killed other
people [the italics are mine].

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Journalists, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, runaways,
historians, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and
novelists have done it. This course will take a look at
prose written after travel. It’s a genre as old as the epic
but still alive and kicking. The course will attempt to pin
down some definitions of the genre. Napoleon took several
hundred scholars with him when he conquered Egypt, intent on
a comprehensive literary, archeological, architectural, and
pictorial record of the country—for what purpose: to freeze
it in time, to organize (and colonize) its history, or
perhaps to differentiate it from France and Europe? It was
a routine of travel writers to take along a handful of
unnamed and often unmentioned extras, though rarely as many
as Napoleon did.

An Arab
proverb says, “Conceal thy tenets, thy wealth, and thy
traveling.” The last is related to the first—by concealing
the fact that you have traveled a great deal, you are
concealing your wisdom (and your tenets)—play dumb until you
know who you’re dealing with. The wealthy young men of
England in the eighteenth century spent several years
traveling abroad (in Europe) to finish—or sometimes
start—their educations. At the heart of Islam is the
request that all Muslims travel once in their lifetime to
Mecca. We are where we’ve been. The Arab proverb above
comes from a Bedouin culture—a traveling culture. All Arabs
traveled, but some traveled further and more intelligently
than others. Americans are travelers—the German playwright
Bertholt Brecht, who lived in Los Angeles during the Second
World War, complained (and marveled) that Americans seems to
carry their houses on their backs like turtles. We move
constantly, restlessly.

James
Clifford, the anthropologist, sees travel as a part of all
human life and history. He asks, in Routes, “What
would happen if travel … were untethered, seen as a complex
and pervasive spectrum of human experience?” Early
twentieth century anthropologists were always on the lookout
for untainted, untouched civilizations or cultures, groups
of people who had no contact with the West, certainly, or
even near neighbors. In The Predicament of Culture,
Clifford describes this idea in detail:

In New Guinea Margaret Mead
... chose not to study groups that were “badly missionized”;
and it had been self-evident to Malinowski in the Trobriands
that what most deserved scientific attention was the
circumscribed “culture” threatened by a host of modern
“outside” influences. The experience of Melanesians
becoming Christians for their own reasons—learning to play,
and play with, the outsiders’ games—did not seem worth
salvaging.

Later
in the century anthropologists rejected this idea, and
Clifford himself urges us to think of humanity as always
traveling. There is no culture that hasn’t been affected
(or infected) by near and surprisingly very distant
cultures. We can trace nearly all of the world’s ancestry
back to about a thousand Ethiopians who walked out of Africa
50,000 years ago and then kept walking until every continent
was populated.

Edward Said, a permanent exile and restless traveler, tells
us (in the last chapter of Culture and Imperialism)
to

Regard
experiences as if they were about to disappear: what is it
about them that anchors or roots them in reality? What
would you save of them, what would you give up, what would
you recover? To answer such questions you must have the
independence and detachment of someone whose homeland is
“sweet,” but whose actual condition makes it impossible to
recapture that sweetness… Seeing “the entire world as a
foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most
people are principally aware of one culture, one setting,
one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this
plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of
simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that is… contrapuntal.

This course will study travel
and food, the uneasy relations between anthropology field
writing and travel writing, and the idea at the heart of
much travel writing, travel through human and family
history. In Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, a
character says, “in modern travel there are no artists—only
critics.” We’ll ask of contemporary travel writing whether
this is true—does it only react to its material or does it
try to find connections between disparate places and the
experiences of those places, as if they were texts?

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS:
You will write one short travel
piece (4 to 6 pages), which will be assigned in groups of
three or four to be discussed during the second part of the
term. You will also write a final paper,
which should be 12 to 15 pages (double spaced, 12-pt times
roman type). We will spend much of the first six weeks
discussing what this paper should accomplish. The final
paper may attempt to do something like what Amitav Ghosh has
done with In an Antique Land, part travel-writing
(revised from workshop piece), part literary essay, and part
history—or what Alphonso Lingis has done in Trust,
part travel-writing, part philosophy. The dimensions of
the parts are up to you, but each must seriously contribute
to the whole. If you have not traveled enough to have
actual travel narratives to write (for the workshop portion
of the course), I expect you to write an imaginary travel
piece (not of an imaginary place, but travel to places
you’ve only read about in this course and elsewhere).